Drew Sechrist: The True Power of Your Personal Network

Now, before we dive into the conversation, I have a special announcement to make. The Make It Happen Monday podcast is now part of the HubSpot podcast network. I couldn't be more excited to be on this network with such an incredible group of podcasters who I can't wait to collaborate with. And to get things started, my good friends Scott Lees and Richard Harris' Surf and Sales podcast is one of my absolute favorites. You have to check them out. Scott and Richard are about as authentic as it gets, and so are their conversations. They talk about all sorts of topics related to sales and give super actionable insights that you can usually apply immediately to your day-to-day role. One of the most recent episodes they talked about was negotiating severance as part of your hiring process.

Yeah, you heard it right. Preemptively addressing the potential of you getting laid off when you're in the interview process. Now, not a lot of people might have the guts to do this, but Scott and Richard give their insights and ways to approach this that could give you the confidence to add this to your story and might even give you a leg up in the interview process if you do it right. So make sure you listen to the Surf and Sales wherever you get your own podcast. Now, let's get into our conversation here on Make It Happen Mondays. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between.

We guess who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, today's conversation is with Drew Sechrist, the founder and CEO of a company called Connect the Dots. Drew and I have more than a few things in common, with one of the main ones being the impact salesforce.com had on both of our careers. He was actually the 36th employee at Salesforce and worked directly with Mark Benioff on most of it. He tells this great story of how he cold emailed Mark one day, who then offered him a job on the spot that made him drop everything and move out to San Francisco. He went on to explain the sales culture that Mark had built and why it was so critical to their success to have everything aligned around sales.

This is also where he saw the true power of leveraging a personal network, which he has now turned into his company, Connect the Dots, which helps people know the strength of all their connections they have through email and LinkedIn and how to leverage them. This was a great conversation that took a lot of different angles to it. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Drew, welcome to Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? John, great to be here. And yeah, I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing well, man. In the chaos that is, the world that we live in right now in tech and sales and sass, it's a good day today. The sun's shining and nobody's bankrupt.

The banks are still paying bills, I guess, right? Is the sun shining in Boston? That's where you are today? It is, yes, it is for a little bit. Spring has sprung in Boston? This is one of those where you still don't come to Boston until probably June, if you're not from here, because this is like the inherently frustrating month, March and April, because you feel it, like you hit that 60, 70 degrees, and when that hits, everybody is outside and everybody's happy. But then the next day, it turns to 20 degrees and everybody gets cold. But yeah, today's a good day. Drew, we have a connection here. And that's going to lead to the conversation. So there's a Salesforce connection that we have a little bit of DNA with, and I would love just to hear a little bit about your background.

And for the audience here, we're going to talk about, you know, this conversation about network and your network and your personal connections and how we can leverage them and maintain them and everything else and why they're so important now more than ever. But we're going to start with Salesforce because you were what, number 36 at Salesforce? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So why don't you bring us through your background, but highlight that. And I would love to hear how you became number 36 because then I want to talk about Benioff a little bit as far as his networking abilities. But talk us through your history, where you're going now. Yeah. Okay. So the irony of how I got my start at Salesforce is that it was through a cold email to Mark Benioff.

And now I'm kind of, you know, my whole life kind of mission in this new company, Connect the Dots is to make it so you don't have to send any more cold emails that you can leverage your network and go in with a warm introduction all the time. So that's the irony of it. But yeah, I was, I grew up on the East Coast and I went south of the Mason Diction for school like you did. And so I was in North Carolina after college. And one of my first jobs was working for a little company that did, it was called Bridge Builder Company. They did CRM and business intelligence implementations for companies kind of in the Southeast, mid-market companies. And one of our bigger ones was like Volvo Trucking was one of our clients.

And we would implement these packaged CRM and business intelligence applications. You probably remember some of them, SalesLogix, Goldmine, BusinessObjects was what they call Seagate Crystal Info back then. All these things have kind of morphed over the years. Some of them died off, but we implemented those products. And I read a, in 1999, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about this move to what was called at the time, the ASP market, Application Service Provider. And John, you probably are old enough to remember that. That was the precursor to what later became called SAS or cloud computing. But it was this idea that you're running the software somewhere else and that you're just delivering the visibility to the software via the internet somehow.

And so, Mark Benioff was apparently, he was leaving Oracle with $2 million from Larry Ellison. And sometime in mid-1999, this is, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, he was going to start this thing called Salesforce.com. They were going to rewrite Salesforce automation software from the ground up to run inside of your browser so that you didn't have to buy a CD-ROM from a company like us and then have us drive out, install it on your computers and network it and custom code, you know, write custom code to make it work the way you wanted it. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, yeah, mind blown. Like, this is definitely the future because I knew what it was like to drive out with the CD-ROM and install it.

It was bad. And so, I cold emailed Mark and I said, could we resell your product, Salesforce.com, whenever it's ready? Because it wasn't ready yet. And he got back to me really quickly and said, we're not going to have a reseller network. We're going to have a direct sales team. And I thought for a second, okay, we should talk about something else then. I want to be involved in some way because I think you're going the right direction. So, he said, fly out to San Francisco and let's talk. And I did. And we met and, you know, asked me what I wanted to do for Salesforce. And I said, I don't know. I can't really code that well. So, probably have me do something other than that. And he's like, you should come out here and sell.

And he basically offered me a job on the spot. I quit the job back in North Carolina, packed up my stuff, drove cross country, and started as employee number 36 in November of 1999. I think it was like around Thanksgiving weekend. Kind of weird time to drive out there. I was going to say that. Yeah. Before you go on, I'm curious. Are you inherently a risk taker? Where do you look at yourself on the risk-taking continuum versus no risk at all towards, like, batshit crazy, I'll jump in, you know, whenever somebody says, let's go? I think it's really lumpy. It's, you know, not, in some areas, I'm super risk-taking. Like, you know, being, I'm an entrepreneur, I've done this twice now. And, you know, putting all of, like, I put a lot of money into my first startup.

You know, I quit a really good, high-paying job at Salesforce. Did he? Would have been really high-paying, you know, if I'd stayed there for a decade instead of leaving for a decade and doing entrepreneurship. Yep. So, I don't know. In that regard, yeah, super, super risk-taking. In our, you know, and I'm, I turned 50 later this year, and I can feel my, you know, my risk-taking in other ways is, is, is waning. Like, I used to, you know, really like to jump off of high things into water. Sometimes in, like, very dangerous situations, these canyons in Hawaii, I'd jump with my friends from, you know, if you're off by six inches, you're probably dead. And I don't do that anymore, you know, like, I know how badly you can get yourself hurt.

I broke my ankle skydiving, you know, so, and then I stopped skydiving after that. So, I don't know. Yeah. It's kind of, kind of lumpy. How do you evaluate risk, though? Because I always say, for me, for instance, I'm a calculated risk-taker, right? Like, there has to be some, I'm not the ultimate risk-taker of drop everything, live on your, you know, parents' basement, ramen noodles type of guy. But if there's a couple of pieces there, you know, I always say my, you know, if I have a gift, it's being able to look at something and with very limited data, you know, two, three, four data points, I can usually make, all right, let's do this and not overanalyze it and go for it. And it's usually all right.

So, how do you evaluate risk? Because that seems like, I mean, with Benioff, you saw the future, but, you know, I was just talking to somebody recently about timing is everything as far as entrepreneurship and ideas and that type of stuff. You could have the best product in the world, but if the market isn't ready for it, then it'll fail no matter how good it is. And you could easily look at something like Salesforce and the cloud and doing all this as, like, market might not be ready for this right now. So, for me to leave a job that is doing what, you know, we're doing and probably doing pretty well doing it to then say, fuck it, let's go. You know, how did you evaluate that? Well, yeah, I guess there's a lot to unpack there.

Let me, let me talk about the risk taking when I jumped on the job at Salesforce. There was no risk from, you know, I was 26 years old. I was working in the provinces of technology out in North Carolina and Mark Benioff, who had already made a name for himself, you know, not, not as big as it is today, but he was, he was doing something really interesting and, uh, and I figured this is my way to get baptized into Silicon Valley. There wasn't a lot of risk there. So I actually say, nah, that's not the risk. You got that. There was definitely risk when, you know, 10 years later, when I left Salesforce, when you started, you know, doing the training for all of Salesforce, uh, that was about the time that I was leaving and, you know, Salesforce was really starting to hit its stride at that point.

And we had, we, we had to fight, you know, for five, five years to just fight for survival and to define who we were and just find the market. And then, uh, you know, we're always the scrappy underdog and then, you know, but then 10 years into that, we were, we were the, if we weren't the Goliath, at least we were the safe bet for if you were a bigger company and you wanted to do SAS for your CRM, we were in the safe bet. And so that was a great time. You know, if you're a salesperson, that's kind of where, where you want to be, that's the sweet spot, right? And that's time to make money. You know, you're going to sell a lot. You got to, these existing customers, you're going to upgrade that you're going to upsell them.

Your product team is always, you know, Mark is always thinking about the next things that we can put into the bag for the sales team to sell. So there's a lot of, a lot to go back and sell them. Um, so that was a, the, that was a really risky, you know, in, in many ways was a really risky way to, uh, to like decide in your career, I'm going to step out, start something from scratch. By the way, it's not like I left it to start an enterprise software company. I left to start something kind of batshit crazy called Kuzu, which I don't want to like, we don't have to talk about that one too much, but it was like a really crazy idea. We're trying, it was like a science fiction project. We're trying to get, um, everybody to put cameras in their windows facing out of the street so that we could weave that all together and create essentially what Google street view is, except live.

So imagine like everybody in Tokyo and San Francisco and New York building a crowdsource network of cameras so you can see in real time what's happening all over the planet. So it's not, it's not like I was, it's not like that was a slam dunk. We can definitely make this thing happen, but why did I, uh, why did I, uh, take that risk? Well, a couple of reasons. One is I was 10 years in at Salesforce and you get one life. And so even if things are going really great, you know, I kind of want a variety of experiences in my life. And one of those was to be an entrepreneur. So I just had to do it. And so part of the way that I evaluated risk in that situation, which may not make me the best risk analyzer, John, but, but, uh, part of it was, you know, on my deathbed, well, I'd be happy if I stayed at Salesforce for 20 years.

And, and the answer, like, I'd be rich, but would I be happy? Like, well, I mean, I probably, you know, I think I've got a pretty high default happiness setting. I probably would have been okay, but I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. So it was just like, I got to do it. It's not, there's never going to be a good time to leave this company. It's a rocket ship. And Mark is steering it really well. So there's always going to be a ton of opportunity here. There are always going to be a lot of stock options that leave on the table that you're going to, you know, you're going to worry about, but at some point it's just not about the money. It's about what, what is the life experience that you want to go have next?

Yeah. Um, and then the other thing to just kind of pile onto that is like, I, I kind of kept my, uh, from just that personal life decision perspective, like, um, I am at 49 years old, unmarried, no kids, you know, I had, you know, I got a mortgage way back in the early days at Salesforce, you know, for my, my place in San Francisco, but Salesforce, you know, that made that really easy to pay and, um, and so I, I could, I could step out and take these risks. Yeah. I was part of it. I wasn't worried about, you know, how am I going to, you know, feed and clothe and educate my kids and have them, you know, have straight teeth with nice braces and stuff like that. I, uh, just wasn't part of my, my consideration.

So how's that? Yeah. No, that's good. I mean, cause I always kind of look the entrepreneurial spirit. I'm always curious where it comes from, right? Like my parents, for instance, they were, they were entrepreneurs without me even knowing it. Right. Cause my mom, when, when I was born, I was nine years, um, older than my, or younger than my sister. And my mom quit a job. Like she had been stay at home mom with my sister while my dad worked. And nine years later, she had a job and it was at Wang Laboratories. And back then Wang Laboratories was like Salesforce, right? Like if you had a job at Wang, you were a baller. But, and she did this and she, she quit and, and stayed at home with me cause she wanted me to have the same experience as my sister.

And what she ended up doing was she started a consultancy. Like, uh, she did, um, you know, help people find jobs and everything else. And so in our, we would walk into our, you know, at a split level and on one side you'd walk in and that was my mom's office. And the other side was the TV in the living room. So inherently I always kind of, my mom was working from home. My dad was a contractor for the FAA. And so when I got into corporate, I, I, I was, I liked it, but there was something off about it. And I just didn't know what it was. I didn't like being put in a box. I didn't like being told what to do. I didn't like going into the office. Like it just didn't feel right. And I had no, I like, like, quite frankly, startups were all for all you weirdos out in California, right?

Like, I mean, I know you started here on the East coast, but that to me was like, yeah, that, that is like here, East coast, you gotta, you know, get a job. You have to do it. You have to work hard and you have to get your promotion and, you know, just earn everything and, you know, startups crazy. But my friend started a company doing it services and I was like, oh, going back to risks, you know, calculated risk taker. He was, you know, he was the ultimate risk taker. He started it from zero mom's basement ramen noodles. They got it to the point where they could at least pay me a minimal, minimal base salary to come on board as a VP of sales and run sales and marketing. And so I made that jump.

And then it was just like, oh, this is, this feels right. You know, all my efforts are a direct line to impact. So did you have that DNA in you or did you kind of develop it as you, uh, as you evolved and saw different opportunities and experiences? I don't know. I, that's hard to say. My, uh, my mom's a school, well, she's a retired school teacher. My dad is a retired, uh, attorney and he worked for after law school, worked for a, uh, a small law firm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a couple of years. And then that law firm disbanded, I think. And then he kind of, you know, decided he was going to hang out his own shingle and be a, you know, be a lawyer, a small town lawyer. And, uh, that's what he did for the rest of his career.

And so, you know, my dad was an entrepreneur, um, but you know, not with aspirations of growing terribly big, just, you know, having people come in and dealing with their legal issues. So I, I, I was not, you know, unfamiliar with not like my dad didn't have a regular paycheck. It kind of went up and down based on how things were going. And, uh, my mom did, you know, my mom had the security of the paycheck and then she had summers off. And, and so I kind of saw those, those two things. Um, and you know, my parents, we were all pretty frugal. Uh, I, I'm not sure that my parents would look at my lifestyle now and say, you're frugal, but I kind of, I kind of am frugal in my own way. And, and that came from them.

I definitely live within my, my means. And that's part of, I think, risk management too. It's like not getting, I did never wanted to get over my skis on personal, you know, lifestyle costs. I always wanted to keep them low enough that if I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I could go do that. And I could eat ramen noodles and live in my parents' basement, whatever or not, or not have to live in my parents' basement, live in my own, my own place and, and still, you know, still be able to be an entrepreneur. And, um, yeah, so I don't know. Was it in my, I mean, where did I get it from? I definitely knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I'm not really sure who I looked to and said, wow, that's who I really want to be like.

Um, I don't know. Yeah, no, but I, I think that though, I think your dad with the, you know, hanging his own shingle, just that, just that knowing that they're not reporting to anybody and they're the one responsible for it. I think inherently as a kid, you kind of, you don't know what that means, but you know that they're not punching the clock every single day and something else is telling that, that in, you know, that paycheck that just comes and goes, I mean, kids pick up on that. Uh, and even if they're not known, I mean, there's, you know, my daughter picks up on the stress when, you know, when things are going well, like no matter how much I try to hide it, it is there. Right. Cause it's on conversations.

It's, it's at the dinner table. You, you know, it's on your face when you come down after a day of getting the shit kicked out of you, like SVP, SVP shows, you know, like I couldn't hide that. So my daughter, I was like, uh, she's like, what's going on, daddy? I'm like, cool. How do I explain this one? You know, like our money's safe, but all of the clients that daddy works with right now are in a lot of trouble. Yeah. And if they stop paying us, then ultimately this could be a challenge for daddy too. Yeah. Exactly. Um, I mean, let me, let me get West coast weird for you on a second. Uh, do you, do you, uh, do you meditate by any chance? I've, I've actually started getting into, um, morning affirmations.

So, uh, for the past about, uh, basically since the beginning of this year, I decided that I've never really been a meditation guy. Cause I just, I don't know why, but my brain just can't shut off. And so like literally just sitting there and just listening to music, I've tried it multiple times. I just can't do it. Um, I probably need somebody who's can guide me through this, but the affirmation of, of meditating and having something, just repeating phrases that I, that's been pretty helpful for me. Cause it gets me in a right state of mind in the morning just to kind of stay focused. But yeah. Why do you ask? Well, just cause I like life is full of stress. It's just the way it is. And particularly if you're going to take an entrepreneurial path, you're going to have the ups and downs and ups and downs.

I mean, you're, you're going to have it in life no matter what, but I think the entrepreneur invites it a little bit more into their lives. And I've just found it super, super helpful, you know, writing out all the bumps. Um, and, and by the way, you know, like same thing you said, mind doesn't shut off and you're always constantly thinking about stuff that kind of like, as I'm, I, I saw Mark do this. I saw Mark, you know, Mark was a big into meditation and that was kind of the, the, I didn't, I was from the East coast. I had no idea what he was doing. I thought it was some sort of strange, you know, religious thing. I didn't know what it was, but that, as I kind of found out a little bit more about it, um, and then started doing it myself and, uh, and, and failing a lot.

Cause when you meditate, that's a really interesting lesson for entrepreneurship too. With meditation, you fail a lot. You sit down to silence your mind and you fail. Your mind doesn't silence itself. It takes a lot, you know, and it takes a lot of like banging your head against that wall over and over and over again to get little wins where it's like, there is a little bit of silence now. Maybe there's a little bit more silence to it. Maybe there's a little bit more silence. And so you, you do get to these points. Like I, you know, now I meditate every day and there are plenty of days where the noise just does not shut off. Like I'll sit there for 20 minutes and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm trying to meditate, but I'm really thinking about stuff, but there are days when I do get nice and silent.

And, and when I come out of that, like either way, I know that I've done something good for myself. It's like, I went to the gym and I know that, you know, some days I had a great workout and another day they didn't have a great workout, but by, by building, building the habit to do it over time, it's going to pay dividends for me. And it's going to help me maintain my cool when you need to. And as an entrepreneur, you got to, like, and you've got a daughter who's at, you know, sees daddy's stressed out about stuff. Like, you know, stress, we don't actually have to be stressed out about anything. We don't have to. Things are going to happen in the world. SVB is going to, you know, go bankrupt and then, you know, be, come back out of the grave on Monday and be just fine.

And, you know, you can ride that, you know, all your, your body can experience that. However, you know, you direct it and your reaction's probably going to be a lot of stress. Yeah. And like, it could manifest itself with higher heart rate and sweating and not sleeping well and stuff like that. But it could also just manifest itself like, Hey, this is yet another inevitable wave of chaos from the universe. Cause that's what the universe does. Let's just ride this thing out and be chill as Aaron Rodgers famously said, right? Just relax. It's going to be all right. Um, I agree. I think, you know, that's why, um, and the audience has heard me talk about this multiple times. I post about it too, is, you know, the, I remember back a few years ago, my wife and I were just super fired up about what was going on in the election.

We were all, you know, pissed and yelling at the screen and watching news quite a bit. And I, I vividly remember as my daughter was six, I remember seeing her really pick up on all of it. And she started to get angry at no, for no reason, you know, she doesn't understand what was going on. So she would be short. And as soon as I recognized what was happening, I was like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. When I stopped the, the shut off the TV and I said, sweetheart, we have to, we can't control what's up there. We cannot control what's on that television right now. We got to focus on what we can control. And it was, uh, we came up, we, we brainstormed and I said, well, what can we control? And it came down to an acronym that we created called EAT, right?

Which is E-A-T effort, attitude, and how you treat people. So you can control your effort, how hard, how hard you work, your attitude, whether it's positive or negative and how you treat other people. You can't control how other people treat you, but you can control how you treat other people. So now every morning we have this nice little handshake, you know, secret handshake that we do, uh, and they'll say, all right, what can we control today? E-A-T effort, attitude, how you treat people. And it's definitely a nice little reminder of, you know, just there's certain shit you just can't control no matter how hard you try. And the harder you try, the more stressful you get. And so if you just kind of even out and realize there are things that are a lot more important than this world, then, you know, as long as you're healthy, you can support your family, you're not living on the streets, you got a house over your head, you know, everything else is kind of table, like everything else kind of works itself out.

I think the right attitude. I write it down. E-A-T. I love it. I'll actually send you one. If you can send me your address, but I even had like these little coins made up where it's E-A-T and then make it happen on the other side. And so I usually give these around to people who I think need it. But if you want. Great. It's Mihaela Avramovic, Chetriya said, awesome, ah, in Belgrade, Serbia. All right, cool. I'll ship it out right now. Also Miami Beach. That one's probably an easier one to send. That'll be a little bit easier. That'll be cheaper for me to send over to you. But Drew, let's, let's, let's transition to kind of what you're doing now, because you had that, um, you had that company that with the, was it Kazoo or Kozu?

Kuzu, yeah. Kuzu, yeah. And then you were, uh, Rocket, uh, was it Rocket Trip? Yeah. I mean, there's a period of time in there where I just kind of, uh, I lived in Spain and kind of goofed off for about a year and a half. And then after that, moved to New York and did a stint as CRO of Rocket Trip, which is really interesting company. But, you know, like, uh, basically it was like the court in the corporate world that I lived in and I, you know, exited when I left Salesforce in 2010, the, the idea there was a lot of people were traveling on, you know, the company dime, you know, for work, you have to fly to Chicago for a conference or go to St. Louis to meet with a customer or something like that.

They had a really clever idea, which was, Hey, we know that our employees are wasting money when they travel. We just know it, you know, like they're, they're paying too much for flights. They're paying too much for hotels. Um, Rocket Trip's idea was what if we just cut the, split the difference with them? We figure out like set a budget for what it should cost to travel. And, uh, if they stay under that budget, whenever they save, then we'll split, split the difference with them. We'll actually give them cash. So at long story short, I'll jump to the punchline here. It was a really great, great idea, great, great idea, but a really hard thing to put into a product to turn, make, make it a like reliably useful product that would save, save money.

So I, that was what I did for, uh, about a year as chief revenue officer. And, uh, and then after that, I, um, took a little more time off again to think about what I wanted to do when I grew up, if I ever, if I ever decided to grow up and, uh, and, uh, I'm still not growing up yet, but I, I did decide what I wanted to do next, which was this thing called connect the dots. And, uh, so started that company about four years ago. Well, so what drove that? Cause I mean, we started this one before we started recording here, you know, the, you know, the whole saying your net worth is your network freight and who, you know, and, you know, it's not what you know, it's who, you know, and I'm living proof of that.

You know what I mean? You went to North Carolina who, you know, probably it was a better school at the time than Maryland. I went down to university of Maryland, drank my way through four years college down there and, you know, and look, I'm not, I wasn't dumb. Like I got decent grades, but I worked my ass off. But a lot of, um, you know, a lot of where I'm part of this conversation is because of the network, if you will, the Salesforce network here. So what drove you and what did you see as a gap in the market to create connect the dots? Yeah. Well, so what, what drove me was like, uh, I realized that I had this super privileged opportunity to work with the Salesforce team from, you know, almost day one, um, for 10 years, uh, it was, you know, I was there before we had a product that we were selling.

We had a, we had a beta that we were getting people to use for free. And so we, we went from pre-revenue to a billion dollars in revenue, uh, when I left 10 years later, I mean, who gets an opportunity like that? Um, I mean, some people do, but it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of dumb luck involved in that. And I feel like I did a pretty good job of seeing that there was really good opportunity at Salesforce, but you know, it could have gone a lot of different directions. So, uh, I had that privilege opportunity to see what does that, what does that success look like? And a big part of it was, uh, the network. Um, it was, there's a whole bunch that goes into it, right? You know, Mark's an amazing CEO, he just, you know, he just keeps constantly doing the right things.

It's really impressive. Um, the product was a good product. It was, uh, it was, the timing was right. Um, the, uh, uh, you know, and, and the culture was great at the company where Mark was like, you know, whatever we need to do to win customers and make them successful. That is what we do. Everybody, all hands on deck all the time. And, um, you know, he, he walked, he walked the walk, talk to talk and walk the walk. He, uh, he, uh, you know, whenever I asked him for an introduction, anybody, uh, that he knew, of course he was going to absolutely do it. And then he encouraged everybody else in the company to do that. And I just took it for granted, like all companies, you know, kind of must operate like this, but it's not really the case.

Everybody in the company had equity. That's important because when you've got equity in, in the company, then, you know, all the right things for the company are what you want to do. That's your, your incentive is, uh, we want to make this company, you know, big and successful. And we want to make, we want to acquire a lot of customers and we want to make them successful. And we want to help the sales team sell. And we want to help the product team with great ideas about what they should build. So that was a really fundamental thing. Um, and because of that, and it certainly in the early days, late in the later day, like Salesforce is a big company now and any big company changes the bureaucracy and the cultural dynamics, interpersonal dynamics change.

And you end up getting these like fiefdoms and people are not necessarily always helping each other. But in the early days, absolutely. You know, like everybody at Salesforce was helping everybody at Salesforce. I remember, uh, um, you know, like, you know, our IT guy was running around trying to find leads for the sale because he had a lot of equity in the company. And he was like trying to like, you know, I found another good lead for you. It's all a good lead for you. It was great. And, um, so, uh, you know, let's back to the, like the specifics on network. Well, actually, can I ask real quick, um, had you ever been in a, in a, in such a sales culture from the top down before it began? And the reason I asked this is because I remember when I, you know, I, I sold IT services.

So I was one five, I was, I, I did, uh, let's see, I did DeWalt. So that was kind of a weird, you know, it was kind of sales, but marketing. And then it was Xerox, you know, it was a copier thing. And yeah, we had salespeople. But then when I started a company, we did, I was one sales guy within 50 engineers. And when I joined it, when I started at Basho, it was like this breath of fresh air because it was sales from the top down. Like the CEO, Jeff Hoffman was absolutely. But to your point, the CTO, like anything I heard out of the CTO's mouth was about sales. How do we drive sales? How do we improve sales? And I, I was almost confused. Cause I'm like, wait a minute, all the technical people, all, everybody else is just driven right now to figure out how to sell more shit and how to do it the right way.

Like this isn't normal, but it was such a breath of fresh air. So before, and I'd love for you to, you know, just unpack a little bit about how the culture was, but before you had that at Salesforce, were you involved in a like top down sales organization? No, nothing, nothing like that. No, I, I mean, I, uh, after I graduated from UNC, uh, I had, I had a girlfriend who was two years behind me in school. So she was still in Chapel Hill and I was looking for something, you know, that I could do near Chapel Hill. And I ended up, um, I did, I had three jobs after, uh, after college. Um, and I, yeah, anyway, long story short, they were all small companies. One was a small startup software company that had a very single sales oriented CEO, but I think he ended up in jail later.

I mean, literally like, like not an ethical guy who did some bad stuff and it was, it was a small, yeah, it was really, it was, it was bad. It was kind of like a, Oh man, is this how much of this am I going to encounter in my career in life? So that, that was, that was about a year. And then I worked for, uh, I worked for a small company that had an engineering leader, you know, and not, um, software engineers is like, you know, like old school products, hardware engineering. And, uh, and then I worked for this, um, uh, this, uh, consultancy, a bridge builder that did implementations. And that was just, it was a small consultancy. It was never really going to get a lot bigger than that. Uh, so no, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know much about sales at all.

When I went to Salesforce, I didn't have a, like a serious sales training or I didn't have a John Barrows teaching me how to do it. I had no idea. I had to pick up a few. I got very nervous actually when I got hired, when Mark said, okay, Drew, you know, there you go. Here's your job. You're an account executive. And I was like, shit, I don't know how to do this at all. Hey, I hate to interrupt the conversation. I hope you guys are enjoying it so far, but we got to pay the bills here. And I got to tell you about the HubSpot CRM. Look, a ton of companies right now are on a ton of pressure to get things done and implement things faster and easier than ever. And long, complex implementation processes or, you know, tools that they don't really need are getting in the way more often than not.

CRM should help you do your job more efficiently, not get in the way of it. And that's what HubSpot's done. We've actually just recently switched over to the HubSpot CRM. And I can't tell you how awesome it was. So easy to implement. So intuitive. Like you didn't even really need to be a technician to figure any of this out or an admin. I mean, you can drag and drop stuff. You can create cadences for your prospecting efforts. You can set up forecast reviews. You name it, you can do it with this tool. There isn't one thing that I found that this thing can't do. And it combines everything. Sales, marketing, customer success. You name it, it's got it in there. And it gives you deep insights so that you can really figure out where your best clients are and how to approach them and then how to drive them through the sales process with ease.

So you got to check out HubSpot CRM. If you haven't used it already, to get started, go to HubSpot.com and you can sign up for free. Now let's get back to the conversation. I think the sales, you know, and the reason I bring it up is because there's a lot of people out there obviously looking for different opportunities and new jobs and stuff like that. And I always tell them when they come up and they're like, hey, John, I got this great op with this new company, with this tech and everything else. I ask them, hey, is the founder a sales-driven founder, a business-driven founder, or are they an engineering-driven founder? Because if you're an engineering-driven founder, I'm not saying it's across the board, but it is rare to have them support sales in a way that's meaningful.

They almost always look at it as, you know, a necessary evil because they think the product can sell itself. And when that's the case, you end up getting extremely frustrated as a sales professional or sales leader. And so looking for those companies that have the Benioffs, that might have that beautiful mix of, yes, he's a tech nerd, but he is sales true and through about everything does. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I mean, my frame of reference was nothing. It's not like I came from, I don't know, some other Silicon Valley company. I came from way outside of Silicon Valley, so I didn't have a frame of reference. I knew from the success and from the support that we were getting from Mark, it was really exciting.

Like, you kind of feel, you know, when you're a young accounting executive, you're like, you may not feel like you're that important. Right. You know? Maybe you're not. You know? Yeah. But like, I definitely didn't feel important at all. Mark made me feel really important. Yeah. Particularly when I closed, you know, some significant transactions. I remember, you know, one day he called me from an airplane, which is like, you know, in 2000, like, who's calling people from airplanes? I couldn't do it. And I, and it was just to congratulate me on whatever, you know, significant deal that I just, just closed. And so, yeah, I saw, um, there, that was the culture, right? Like salespeople who are delivering, um, for the company, they're, you know, they are, they're doing, you know, the most important work in the company next to building the product.

Sell it and build it, sell it and build it. Those two things really important. Yeah. And, um, yeah, so that was, uh, it was amazing to be inside that culture. And I know a lot of people, I hear about people who left and they kind of assume that's how it was going to be. And then they went to whatever other company and they're like, it's not how it is, man. This is not how it is. Yeah. I like that people go to Google. It's not like that. It'd be cool. No. Very different than Google. Definitely not. Um, cool. So you're, you're there, you saw the power of network. You saw the power of people supporting each other. Um, you, I think there was one thing that I read that said Benioff is the number one networker, as you put it.

Yeah. Um, so, so you, you saw it real world about how the impact of everybody supporting each other. Obviously by the time you started, um, this, you know, LinkedIn had been out for, I don't know how long, right? I mean, since the 2000, I forget when LinkedIn actually started, but, um, 2003. So, you know, you're, you're 15 years into this LinkedIn world of, Hey, well, why would you do this, Drew, if there's literally a platform that is this at its, at its ethos or as it, you know, if their mission is to connect the dots, right. For people. So the gap, as you saw it, and then why do you think there's that gap and what do we need to do about it so that we can leverage our network the right way?

Yeah. I actually don't know if LinkedIn's mission was to connect the dots. Um, okay. So probably go check it out and see what their mission is. The, uh, the, the, the issue was, um, was really this, like we have, uh, we have LinkedIn and it's great. I love the LinkedIn. I use it all the time. I'm really, really happy they exist. Um, and we've got other social networks that are useful to, you know, Facebook kind of, I don't use it as much anymore, but it's still there and Instagram. And we have all these things that are ways that we organize our relationships. Um, but this, the problem with LinkedIn that I observed over time, uh, and I think, you know, I think you probably have experiences too, maybe even like seemingly higher degree than I have is, um, in the early days, it really, if you were LinkedIn with somebody, it really probably meant you knew that person and you could tell how you knew that person personally because it was a small network and, uh, and partially because there's better hygiene and the networking and LinkedIn, they, they, they really encouraged you to, you know, like, don't connect to this person unless you really know them in real life.

You know, you've seen this person and you've shaken hands and whatever. And over time that just kind of stopped happening. And I remember there was actually one kind of fateful, like massive pollution moment. My grasp, I did something, I clicked on something that LinkedIn sent me and I don't know what happened, but then all of a sudden I had like another thousand people that I was connected to that I just like accepted. I don't know what happened. And then I was like, Oh no, I, now I look through LinkedIn and like half the people on here, I don't know who they are. So, and then fast forward, you know, to now to 2023, more like 90% of the people on my LinkedIn, I don't know. So I have it. Yeah.

I was super awkward with that, by the way. And for anybody out there listening, please don't ask me for an intro on my LinkedIn. Just don't. Because I have, I have something like 400,000 followers. I got 30,000 connections. The likelihood of, first of all, the likelihood of me knowing you well enough, right, is not high. The likelihood of me knowing that person well enough. And, and, and again, to put my name on you, that's the thing I want to dive into here is like the referral world. You were literally asking somebody to put their reputation on the line. Totally. Yeah. And, and that's not a, you know, that's not a small thing. And I, and I, I fear a little bit now, and I know we're moving a little slightly different direction, but when you and I grew up in sales, networking was a thing.

Like you went out and not that it's not now, but because most, you know, I, I was at, I would do cold calling all day long, whatever, but I'd be at networking groups in the morning. I'd go to networking events in the afternoon. I'd shake hands, kiss babies, hand out cards. I mean, that was literally, I mean, I didn't have kids back then, so I didn't give a shit. I was working 17 hours a day, six, seven days a week. And all of that, because of all that, because of all that networking and givers gain mentality, when LinkedIn did come out, it was natural for me. I was like, oh, cool. This just can allow me to put my, you know, on steroids. But I understand it. I understood how to respectfully connect with people, ask for connections and that type of thing.

Whereas now that everything's virtual, everything's such a short-term thing, it's, it's now a hack to look at somebody's connection to make a connection to somebody else. And they're even using your name without your permission, right? Oh, Drew, I see you're connected to John. So am I. We'd love to talk. It's like, what the fuck? Like who in the right minds, right? So talk to me a little bit about that. Hey, you went to Maryland, you know, I ate a Maryland crab cake one time. Right. Can we get 15 minutes on the calendar next week? Yeah. It's, it has been so, I don't know, bastardized or watered down that it really is now just a, all right, cool. I'm going to post some stuff and get some more followers here.

I don't really care who those followers are. Cause you don't know. There you go. Well, that's what happened. I mean, honestly, John, like what we built connect the dots to do is solve that exact problem. You said, like, don't ask me for an introduction. You're kind of broadcasting that out to just the world out there. But the reality is, I'm sure you're happy to make the right introduction for the right person, for the right reason. Yep. Right. Like, you know, like people can see, I know Mark Benioff and then they asked me for an intro and I'm like, no, like, like what? First, first of all, I got to think like, I'm going to burn my social capital with Mark. I'm sure if it's the right thing, I'll make the introduction to Mark, but you got to nail it.

You got to make sure it's really something that Mark cares about right now. And you got to make sure that, you know, I understand what's in it kind of for Mark and what's in it for me. And, and you got to ask me in the right way and make it real nice and, you know, show that you're appreciative. Like there's a lot that goes in. There's a whole bunch of psychology that goes into that. But the problem with the LinkedIn graph at this point is it is so massive and it doesn't, there's no signal in there about whether I actually know anybody. So it's like groping around in the dark saying, Hey, John, I see, you know, so-and-so could you introduce me? Like, no, I don't know that. I mean, I, I don't, maybe I know that first.

I'm actually kind of embarrassed because maybe I'm supposed to know that person. Cause I mean, I am LinkedIn, but I don't have any context about it. I don't know. Maybe I met him at a trade show or it was like one of those networking things. I had, you know, one too many Manhattans. I don't know. Uh, so like it's a, that's the problem that we're solving and, and the missing link is what we call relationship strength. It's the visibility to who actually knows who, like how well do you know each other? So John, this is the first time we're talking, um, uh, scale of three options. How well do you think we know each other? One is weak. What the next is familiar. And the next one is strong. I would say week before this familiar coming out of this, um, but it's based on this conversation, right?

I mean, I think to your point, you were at Salesforce back then I was there. So there's a loose familiarity here, but I would venture to say in general, it would, I would put this on the weak side, like prior to and around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I would actually say like, we didn't really know each other before this call today. Um, and, um, although like we have a lot of people in common, like I know a lot of people, you know, and vice versa. And I would agree that, you know, after a conversation like this, I, I feel like I've got a familiar, you know, I, I, I know you well enough that like, I might actually ask you for something someday. I might ask you a favor and I'd be happy for you to ask me a favor, uh, just do a, you know, just do a good job of it.

Don't ask me for the wrong thing. And make sure there's like whoever you want me to make an introduction to, or if you want information about somebody that I know, um, you know, make sure that it's don't waste my time. And with, uh, with LinkedIn, what happened? Uh, so I, by the way, Mark was amazing at blowing doors open for me in Silicon Valley. And I could use Mark, like, I know I talked about Mark as like a stick of dynamite. Like I could, uh, you gotta be careful where you place it. Cause you could blow a door open or you can blow up the entire deal and, you know, take a lot of people out with it. But you know, Mark knew a lot of people. So I could ask him for introductions when I could figure out like, Hey Mark, we're trying to break into Cisco, do you know John Chambers?

And he's like, yeah, I know John Chambers from blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. Mark, I'm going to write you an email that I want you to send to him. And, you know, Mark would mark over time, got to know that I would write correctly. You know, I'd write as if I were Mark and it really, you know, I perfected his style, uh, down to the punctuation. And I could be using capital letters and stuff like that back when he had his Blackberry and, and then he would just copy and paste it and send it on. And, you know, so I was basically the puppet, puppet master behind the scenes getting Mark to, you know, do the things that I wanted him to do because he had this big name and he was, uh, you know, he could, he had the title and, and he could really get people to respond.

But I also figured out how to do that with, um, with customers, figure out who our customers would know, and then I would ask them to make introductions for us, uh, and then the rest of our executive team, any coworkers, friends, whatever, just like finding people who knew the people that you wanted to get to at companies, whatever you could do that. Um, there was, I don't know, a million times better than trying to send them a, you know, get cracking cold with a cold call or a cold email. I don't know how to quantify it, but it was just like so infinitely better when you could do that. And I remember we hired, um, you know, Jim Steele, I'm sure. Uh, so, you know, when, when we hired Jim in and I was part of the interview process for Jim, so I, you know, I interviewed him and I, and Mark asked me afterwards, what do you think?

I said, two thumbs up. He's awesome. I love him. And then the, so Jim, you know, uh, was hired shortly after that. And he's like, Drew, thanks. I really appreciate you giving me the green light to Mark. What can I do for you? And I was like, well, here's my territory list. Who do you know with these, these companies? And he found somebody that he knew really well. And then we, I mean, he called, we got it, we got an immediately. We got an, we got an opportunity created. We closed the thing within, I don't know, a couple months. And it was like a million dollar deal. And like that paid off really, really well. And so, you know how much I would have gotten out of that account that year, had it not been for Jim knowing the people over there?

Not much. Zero dollars and zero cents. Like it was a complete, like, and that happened all the time. I mean, maybe not to that level of extreme, but people buy from people. Um, people answer emails from people that they know people delete emails from people that they don't know, particularly now there's so much volume. Well, you know, of the, the cold outreach stuff. So that was the problem that we, we organized around to solve. And the way that we saw that just real simply is, is like we, when you create a connect the dots account, connect the dots is a big graph of people who know each other. And you create your connect the dots account by, you can connect all your LinkedIn accounts. That's fine.

You can import all of them, but that's just one component. Uh, the other component is all of your email history across the, you know, your entire life. So every email account that you have access to now, both personal and professional, you connect those and we've built the technology that analyzes all of the, uh, the header information on all the emails you've ever sent or received. And based on like, John, if you and I have emailed a bunch, then it will calculate that we have a strong relationship. If we've only yelled a little bit, it's a weak relationship. And so that's the missing link. The missing link is like, who really knows who is it weak, familiar, or is it a strong relationship? And then when you have that information, you can make smart asks, you know, I'm not going to waste your time asking for somebody, you know, it's just a LinkedIn connection.

You don't really know that person. Um, and, uh, and it also just organizes your own life. You like, you actually can see, you know, there's all those people that you've created in, you know, as LinkedIn content or LinkedIn connections, we actually overlay LinkedIn. So you can actually see, have I ever emailed with this person? Have I ever communicated with this person? That's huge. Um, and, uh, so for like, we don't call it this officially, but the executives, more senior executives who have a lot of history out there and they met a lot of people, we have this, uh, the feature that they like the best. The feature is we, how the hell do I know this person? I'm looking at their LinkedIn profile and then I can actually see, oh, I emailed with them in 2008 about this thing.

Now I have the complete context. I know exactly who this person is before that. No clue. Uh, you're talking about my life. Basically my, uh, I have such a bad memory when it comes to names. I always say, so you actually, you'll appreciate this one. You remember, you know, you know, Garth from Jigsaw who, uh, when Salesforce bought Jigsaw, Garth was one of their founders or co-founders. Uh, I don't think I know Garth, but you know, I will in the background check you on the dots here and I'll tell you very quickly. Long story short on this. It was, uh, I was at an AAIS or a, I forget what type of conference it was. Oh, sales 2.0 or something like that. And I didn't want to sit and listen to the idiot presenters like me.

So I was, you know, hanging around with all the booths and I come across this guy and he's just like the happiest guy on the planet. Right. And we just start getting in and we get into like a really deep conversation. Right. And it's about passion and life and all this cool shit. Right. I didn't ask him one thing about what he did, where, you know, who he worked for, or any of that stuff. And at the end I was, Oh yeah. Hey, just out of curiosity, by the way, you know, who, you know, who you work for, you know, what's that? He's like, Oh, you know, I worked for a little company called Jigsaw. And I had just read that morning that Jigsaw had gotten acquired by, by Salesforce. I was like, Oh shit, man.

Well, that's why you're so happy. I'm like, good for you. You know, fast forward, we're at Dreamforce. Okay. And I'm in the mode of, you know, you know, if I've trained Salesforce between 2010, 2017, thousands and thousands and thousands of sales reps, nevermind the ecosystem. So when I'm at Dreamforce, my brain just basically shuts off. Like, I just, I don't know anybody's name. I don't want to even pretend to. I'm like, Hey, what's up? So I'm sitting there at Soho and I, and the, and the crowd parts and there's this guy with this huge shit eating grin on his face. And he's like, do you know? And he's like, he's like, so you could, and he's beeline and straight for me. And I'm just like, Oh shit.

I have no idea who this guy is. Like, I, you know, I'm in that mode and he's like, Hey man, how you doing? And I tried to pull off that. Hey, yeah, what's up, man. How you been? Right. Total bullshit. And about a minute in, he's like, you have no idea who I am, do you? And I'm like, um, and I made it exponentially worse because I was like, dude, I'm sorry. I'm like, everybody here is like, I'm getting approached with them at every different angle. I go, and I said, what are you an AE or something here? And he goes, dude, are you serious? And he starts laughing, right? He's like, are you kidding me? He's like, I absolutely love this. He's like, you and I had the best conversation I think I've had in years.

And you don't remember. I was like, shit, Garth. Oh, what's up, man? Right. And he, and he starts laughing and he's like, dude, that was hysterical. I'm like, why is it hysterical that I forgot your name? And he's like, John, do you have any idea how often that happens to me? He goes, my name's Garth. So first of all, it's a pretty memorable name. Second of all, I sold my company to Salesforce. So obviously people know me, right. So I get in conversations 10 times a day where I have no fucking clue who I'm talking to. And they, they're my best friend. He's like, so the fact that you did that to me is just hysterical. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, interestingly enough, I mean, he was also kind of trying in some way trying to solve this problem by building a grant, you know, a network of people.

And we all have this fear. I think we all like dream force is a kind of a frightening event for me. Yeah. Yeah. Like how, how am I possibly going to remember everybody's name that I, if you're in sales, like you and I are, it's just not possible. So I don't have the solution for that yet until we have the, uh, AR. They're coming out. You see Google got the new, like I have been dying for Google glasses that are hooked up to LinkedIn with facial recognition. Yeah. And my email. So when I walk up, it's just literally like, you know, was it free guy, the movie with Ryan, Ryan Reynolds, where it's like, Hey, Drew, what's going on? How's your kids? That was my dream come true. But let's finish, let's finish on a tactical note.

Um, because there's an etiquette to networking. There's an etiquette to approaching people. Strength of connection matters, obviously. So if you can identify that before making that, but you even talked earlier about like getting referrals to inside organizations, what is your recommendation for people who, who find somebody is connected to somebody they want to talk about? How should they be approaching them? Uh, and you know, as far as you want to test them first and then write something for them, you know, draft on behalf, that type of thing. Like where, where's your head at when it comes to the go-to recommendation for asking for referrals? Well, so it's a huge topic because, you know, there are a lot of different types of people out there in the world that could, um, you know, be a referral or an introduction for you.

I would say, you know, uh, first of all, if I were in sales, uh, I am, I would definitely work for a company where the culture is we're all hands on deck, trying to help the sales team. Everybody's making referrals whenever they can. If you find yourself at a company that's not like that, I would say probably leave unless they have just some mind-blowingly amazing technology. Um, but otherwise leave, you know, go find a good, good company that's got that culture. And then if they've got that culture internally, then, you know, it should be very easy, um, to, uh, ask for an, ask for introductions inside the company. Now, if you're asking outside the company, that's like, you know, me at Salesforce back in the day, asking for Mark Benioff or, you know, one of our, you know, our CFO or somebody, they should just do that.

Uh, and then in that case, figure out your cadence with them. You know, how, how do they like to engage? I, I generally think that draft on behalf is great. Have that, have it come from them or they should be the one out, you know, doing the outreach. They shouldn't be introducing the account executive. Uh, and they should probably take the first call to be honest. Like if it's inside your company, Mark Benioff is sending it out, you know, he should be like nowadays he's too big for that. But back then he should be the one taking the first call with John Chambers or whoever it is on the other side. Uh, and then you can bring the account executive in you, if you're the account executives, uh, you can be brought in, you ride shotgun.

And then at the end of the call, Mark's like, okay, Hey, now you, you go, uh, run down all these tasks that we have agreed to with John Chambers here to, you know, uh, to go make this thing happen with the Cisco. So that's inside the company. If it's outside the company, if you're asking like customers and that's the name, I would say, you know, you've, you should have earned it by that point. Now, now if it's your customer and you did a good job, you sold them, you know, the good product and service, you got them implemented correctly, they're, they're getting a lot of value from it. You know, hopefully you're selling your customers things that they get a lot of value out of it. They might even get promotions and things like that.

You've earned it. This should be your friend at that point, you know, your customer and your friend. And it should be pretty simple. It's like, Hey, you know, you're, uh, you're a director of sales ops or your VP of sales ops. And, and I see that you've got these, you know, five people that in your network that, you know, really well, who are also heads of sales ops for companies that we sell to. Um, would you mind if I asked you to make an introduction to them? Cause you got a lot of success. Um, you know, and you know, firsthand that we can, we're capable of, you know, uh, you know, driving, uh, success for, for you. And we should be able to do it for them. Would you mind if I, if I, if I, if I asked you for an introduction to them and, uh, and I did that all the time at Salesforce, I didn't have the tool of connect the dots to see everybody that they knew.

But whenever I found out that they knew somebody, I would ask them and I would write for them, say like, here, this is something you can copy and paste and send as your own to see if that person's open to the conversation with them. A lot of people are, you know, they want the double opt-in, you know, they, they want like, you know, I'll, okay, fine. I will send this to my friend who's the VP of sales ops at that company to find out if their interest in the conversation was there. And if they reply affirmatively, then I will loop you into that reply. But, and then you guys can take it from there. I think that's how probably most people want to do it. Um, I do know some people who are just, they're like, I'm just going to make the introduction and it's not, it's not, it's not, it's probably better to do the double opt-in, but I've also seen the other, the other way, not, you know, work and not blow up, uh, in somebody's face.

Yeah. Um, I do that with my team right now. I, my team actually, because my LinkedIn connections are so pretty significant, you know, significant, engaged with a lot of people, they'll go find somebody that fits the profile. They'll then go do the research on the account of why they want to talk to that person and then send it to me and say, Hey John, I see you're connected to so-and-so actually wanted to reach out for these reasons. Could you make an intro? I'll then use that. I'll actually forward it without changing it and say, Hey Drew, you know what? Hey, it's been a while, man. Um, you know, one of my sales reps actually was digging around and saw that you and I are connected, prompted me to reach back out to you.

We haven't chatted. Let's jump on a call. And to your point, I jump on the call first as a, Hey, what's ups? And then obviously what are we up to? Hey, I need any sales training that I handed off. And that's been extremely successful. Great. Yeah. Um, I, yeah, I, the, the one kind of like rule of thumb I would just say is just make sure whenever you're making your request that you understand what's in it for everybody. Yeah. You know, what's it, if I asked John, you to make an introduction to somebody, you know, what's in it for John? Right. John going to look good. Like it's John going to like, is John spending his social capital or does John actually get some social capital from this? Because it's like a really good thing.

And I want to put you in the position as like, John's going to look good. You know, John's going to get social capital from this. And the way to do that is the person that, you know, it should be somebody you want to reach out to. Like maybe there are people you want to avoid. And so if that's the case, I might not know, I might not know that, but if it's somebody you want to reach out to and you're offering them something that's like insight, um, and potentially quite valuable for them that can really help them, then you're going to look good. Right. And, uh, but if, if I'm not teeing that up so that it's clear to you, John, and I'm not teeing it up, so it's going to be clear to the person I'm asking for the introduction to, then I shouldn't be doing it.

I got no business here. Um, and, uh, so what, one of my, one of my favorite introducers of all time, uh, is, uh, is a, is an investor at Bessemer. And he was on my board, uh, when I was at a rocket trip and he, he always thinks about it like this. He's like, I feel like if I'm going to do it, I need to feel like I'm doing a favor for both parties. Yeah. Yeah. You need to. Cause if it's not, if there's nothing in it for them, I mean, what's the point. So that, that's that, you know, put yourself empathy, put yourself in somebody else's shoes, what you're looking for. Because to your point, I don't think, I don't think people realize, especially who've been in business as long as you and I do, like those, those cash in those chips, like those are, those are valuable fucking chips.

And I'm not going to cash one in for somebody I barely know who's done no work and is looking for the easy way out. Like I will not, I just straight up say, I'm like, sorry, I'm not going to refer you. Even though I do though, the person, cause you didn't put any effort into it or to your point, make it easier for me, right? Like have a list of companies that you're trying to get into. Tell me which ones, ask me which ones I have connections with, then go do, and then I'll check off some boxes. Then you go do the homework of why you want to talk to them and then send me that email. But it's not, I mean, that's why I was going back to the beginning of this conversation, as far as I think the laziness factor of truly understanding the value of that relationship that somebody has is not something that they're just going to give freely to a sales rep.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And do the work. I remember like the, uh, when I would write an email for Mark to send to somebody that could be days and it could be like three sentences, you know, and it'd be like, I'd write it. And then I'd be like, that's not quite right. And I'd do it a couple. And then I'd be like, I gotta, I gotta go walk and think about this. And I like, cause I want it. You have one bullet, right? If you're going to ask somebody who's got there, they got a busy, you know, schedule, they got a whole bunch of other stuff to do. That's not helping you make introductions. Uh, then you better nail it. Yeah. You know, so do the work in advance. I just had a cat jump on my lap here. Yeah.

Love it. Well, I mean, we're, we're, we're, I mean, we, I think we could keep talking about networking for, for a long time because I do believe it is, um, asking for referrals, I think is actually one of the most underutilized, easiest ways to get business, but doing it the right way is the important part. So I think a lot of generation grew up without networking and now they're kind of jumping into it and assuming that this is, oh, sure. No problem. Make the connection to somebody you've known for 20 years and really built that relationship for just, yeah. So, you know, I, I think we're, you and I are on the same page is just getting people to do it the right way. So thanks for, thanks for coming on.

Go ahead. Yeah. I was just, you, you really, you're making me stroll down like memory lane here and thinking about the early days of, you know, in a sales career, we did a lot of like personal in-person socializing, not really sure, you know, not really with an objective of like, we don't know where this is going necessarily, but like building networks and building relationships and paying it forward and doing favors for people. And then that, you know, playing the long game and it really pays off now that, you know, we're our age, but I, I do kind of worry about the, you know, the, the next generation of sales. Um, and you know, how are they doing that? Cause it's the opportunity that everybody's gone to these remote first environments.

We, I mean, we really bonded over, you know, drinks and happy hours and, you know, uh, dinners and traveling together and stuff like that. And where is that? You know, I hope that it's on one, some of these platforms and you and I are kind of the old men in the room saying, Oh, you know, this is back. And my hope is that they somehow can find meaning in relationships remotely, um, through either, you know, Instagram or Tik TOK or some type of thing, even though they might not even know who that person is really. So I, I hold out a glimmer of hope. Uh, but I do, I am concerned just like you that, that even being, I mean, forget about networking for a minute, even be just being the office, the first few years as a sales rep and, and being in that bullpen and listening and picking up through osmosis.

Like there's just something about that, that you can't beat and going to networking events. But to your point, I never, I had an agenda. Obviously I was trying to meet as many people, but I wasn't there to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. I had that mentality of how can I help other people? Like, what can I do here? And yes, if it happens to come up with what you need as something I have, let's definitely dive into that. But I'm trying to make sure as I am connected with as many people as I possibly can and do as many favors as I possibly can. So eventually one day I can cash those, you know, in, and it's not because I'm, I'm keeping score. It's just, when you have that long-term mentality, you can lean back on your network when you have to.

And that is critical when you have to, especially in times like right now. Yeah. Yeah. Totally great. Awesome. Totally great. Cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on, Drew. It was a fun conversation. What's, um, tell people about connect the dots. Where, where do you want them to go? What, where can they learn more? Cause I'm a, I'm a big fan of what you're doing. I think a lot of people should check it out here. Yeah. Uh, real easy. It's a, our website is ctd.ai, like connect the dots.ai ctd.ai. And, uh, we actually just took the waitlist down. There was a waitlist, uh, for a long time. And, uh, now you can go, uh, create your account, uh, right away. And if you, uh, want to reach out to me for any reason directly, I'm drew at ctd.ai.

Perfect. Awesome, Drew. Well, thank you again. And, uh, hopefully everybody got something out of this conversation, made them think a little bit different, uh, so that they can go out there and do something differently and maybe respect their network a little bit more. So I appreciate you coming on that. Thanks a lot, John. And everybody out there, if you're listening, um, like I always say at the end, all of these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day, you think your day is going, or you think it went, if you made somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side.

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